A Bold Duff
by Torotyrannus15
Summary: *no affiliation with The Simpsons.* Part 1 of 2 of the story of a lonely platybelodon named Duff and an orphan paeleotherium named Serafina. After years of solitude after his family's murder, and the recent death of her family, will the two mammals find hope and happiness in eachother? Rated K -T for violence and mentions of blood.


**Greetings and salutations, readers! I hope you're all excited for my very first Ice Age fanfic!**

**Now, before we get started, there are some things I'd like to mention;**

**1: This fanfiction and others following it are canon to the films so far. Ice Age 5 hasn't come out yet, so I'm not technically making it AU.**

**2: Most of the characters of this story will be OCs, and if you think I'm making too many, shut up.**

**3: I have no copyright to any of the elements of the Ice Age franchise outside of this fanfic universe, and I will say what's mine and what's not.**

**Now that that's out-of-the-way, let's get started!**

**A/N: As you may or may not know, some of the animals in the films are** known** by attributal names, like in the Land Before Time films. 4 example, Platybelodons are called "shovelmouths" in the franchise, and Paeleotherium is called a "trunkless start'' or ''start". I will be referring to mentioned animals as such, but I will point out what they really are if it isn't clear.**

**Heads-up: Sorry, but some of you are just gonna HATE Diego in this first chapter!**

**Now, enough jibber-jabber, we have a fanfic to get to!**

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><p>The full moon shone high in the night sky, casting its white, soothing glow over the lush valley. The herds of mammals that would be bustling and going about their lives during the day were for the most part fast asleep. The animals were all holed up in their dens, caves, and nests, slumbering alongside their families. One mammal, however, was wide awake, looking up at the twinkling stars and glowing moon. He had gray skin and a long, shovel-shaped snout, bearing slight resemblance to a hippopotamus, but taller and less, well, blubbery. His lower jaw ended in two flat, rounded tusks, which his kind used mainly for scooping tasty water plants out of the shallows, or digging in the soft mud for roots by the lakeshore. His kind were, with good reason, widely known as shovelmouths.<p>

This particular shovelmouth went by the name of Duffon, Duff for short. Duff was a kind, friendly, and selfless mammal, yet, strange as it would sound if you saw him today, he wasn't always.

Duff suddenly heard something scuttle around in the shadows, and immediately moved to protect the smaller mammal slumbering beside him. He breathed out in relief only when he saw that the noise came from nothing more than a small saber-toothed squirrel, often called a scrat(though Duff had no idea why), sniffing around for acorns. Duff looked down at the mammal he had just pointlessly tried to defend, smiling to himself with a quiet chuckle.

Her name was Serafina, Sera for short, though Duff preferred her full name. She was only a few years old, and she was the most beloved thing in the entire world to Duff; his daughter.

But Serafina was not a shovelmouth like Duff. She was a trunkless start, or just start, short, plump, waddling mammals with short, barely useful trunks on the faces. Personally, Duff thought that name was unfair, making it sound as if the starts were beneath other mammals, especially their long-trunked relatives, the mammoths. Duff snorted at such discrimination. He himself and his species were related to mammoths as well, and they didn't have even anything that resembled a trunk. But Duff knew there was no way he would ever be able to change the common name of an entire species, and Sera didn't seem to mind her alleged trunklessness much at all.

Serafina snuggled up to her father's side in her sleep, and Duff smiled even wider. The shovelmouth looked behind him, further into the cave where they slept, looking at his herd, nay, family, as they slept peacefully. This particular herd was made up of several different mammals, and no more than three of them were of the same species as the others. Heck, one of them wasn't even from the ice age!

Duff thought back to how they all met. It was a long, but very good story, with happy parts, violent parts, sad parts, and some utterly devastating parts, and really the only way to tell it was to start all the way back at the beginning...

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><p>The night was cold and quiet, typical of the ice age. The ground was mostly covered in a blanket of snow, and tall coniferous trees grew in a tight forest. No one would guess that, on this silent, otherwise peaceful night, a young mammal's entire life was being shattered in front of his very eyes.<p>

"Dad!"

"Go, son! Get out of here!"

"But dad-"

"I said go! All of you, go! Run!"

A juvenile shovelmouth calf watched in horror as his father was relentlessly attacked, by one of the most feared creatures alive; sabers. A whole pack of them. The knife-toothed felines had ambushed them as they slept, but thankfully his father had a keen ear. The family tried to run, but the cats were too quick for them, and there were too many for his parents to fight their way out. The calf's eyes turned to the lifeless form of his mother, her throat torn by the fangs of the predators. He then turned back to his father, who was desperately trying to keep his legs up as the sabers continually lunged at him. He managed to throw some of them off to painful contact with the ground or his hoofed feet, but he was clearly weakening. Wounds from the cats' fangs and claws covered parts of his hide, and one of his ears had been torn by their claws. The shovelmouth father turned back to his son momentarily.

"Dad!" The calf yelled.

"Listen to me, Duffon! Run! Take your brother and sister and run away from here, as fast as you can!" He was interrupted by another pounce of a saber. "GO! Run and don't look back!"

"Daddy..." Young Duff began to cry.

"I SAID **GO-O**!" Duff's father roared as he threw the saber off, taking a fair chunk of himself with it. Without wasting another second, Duff, followed by his two younger siblings, took off into the undergrowth as fast as their legs would carry them. Their father watched them escape, praying that they would survive. However, the saber's leader saw the calves take off.

"Diego, get those calves!" He said with malice. The saber in question pursued the calves into the dense bush, much to the horror of their father.

"NO!" Duff's father yelled with pure horror written on his face. He tried to push himself up to go after them, but the other sabers held him down. "You already have my wife and me! Please, let my children live! _Please_!" He begged. The sabers' leader merely looked down at him and laughed darkly.

"Sorry, shovelmouth. You know the rules; only the strong survive, and it looks like you and that little family of yours just weren't tough enough for this world." The father's expression turned from desperate pleading to pure, seething hate.

"You're a monster." Was all he could say before the saber lunged for his neck.

The three calves hurried through the undergrowth faster than any shovelmouth before them, with the saber pursuing them not far behind. Duff was in front, with his younger brother and sister just behind him. All three of them wept as they heard the dying roar of their father as his throat was slashed, but they could not stop to mourn.

"Duff!" His sister called out. "Where are we going?!"

"Somewhere far away from here!" Duff called back. Suddenly the calves heard a roar behind them, and the saber named Diego burst out of the bushes, catching up to them.

"Hurry! Go faster!" Duff shouted to his siblings. Suddenly, the rest of the saber pack came out of nowhere and surrounded the calves. The sibling trio huddled together in fright as the predators came closer, one looking particularly eager to rip out their entrails.

"Well, look at what we have here, boys." Said a malevolent voice. The calves stared in horror as the saber that had killed their father appeared before them. "Three scared little shovelmouth calves, all alone, with no hope of surviving without their mommy and daddy."

"You're wrong!" Duff's brother retorted, to brave for his own good. "We will survive!"

"Yeah!" His sister added. "We've got our big brother Duff to protect us!" The saber turned his gaze to Duff, who froze in fear.

"Really?" The saber said slowly. "Well, then 'Duff'', how about showing me and my boys here just how big and strong you are."

"Yeah! Let 'em have it, Duff!" His brother cheered. However, Duff remained standing there, frozen. His siblings were confused.

"Duff? Duff!" His sister called, but Duff did not respond. "Duff! What's wrong with you?!"

"Just as I thought." The sabers' leader laughed with a devilish smile. "Diego, would you do the honors?" The sabers growled before the one who had chased the calves pounced, followed almost immediately by the others. But Duff did not see anything, or hear anything that followed, because he was running.

Duff deperately tried to choke back a huge ammount of tears as he tried not to look back. He kept running. And running. And running. He ran all night, never daring to stop, not for the entire night. It was morning when he at last reached the open ground at the edge of the forest. By this time Duff was exhausted, and as he collapsed against a smooth rock, streams of warm, salty tears burst from his eyes at an unfathomable rate. Duff sat there for hours, bawling his golden eyes out and wailing like a restless soul, occasionally screaming out "**I'M SORRY**!" to no-one. His cries and screams echoed around him, wavering through the sky and air.

It wasn't until nearly twilight that Duff's intense sobbing came to an end, and his remaining tears cascaded down the rock and into several small puddles on the ground. There Duff lay, too exhausted from the crying to move yet unable to fall asleep. Until a low rumbling sound caught his ears. He blinked his eyes to clear out any remaining teardrops, and looked up to see hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other mammals treading the ground in front of him. Mammals of all species together in one huge convoy. Duff recognized the herds of mammals before him as the Great Migration, when all the mammals headed south to warmer climates to escape the devastating ice age winter. Duff and his family had been preparing to leave for the migration and would've headed out today, had they lived.

Duff could see dozens upon dozens of mammals, including aardvarks, starts, dodos, glyptodons, sloths, rhinos, macrauchenia, and even shovelmouths like him.

Duff watched the migration for a while, but before long, a single macrauchenia stole a glance to the side and noticed Duff sitting there alone. Wanting to help, the mammal broke from the convoy of mammals and stopped in front of Duff, who stared up at the trunked creature in awe.

"Hey, little fella'." It said kindly. "Where'd you come from?"

"The forest." Duff whimpered hesitantly, clearly fearful of strangers. The macrauchenia looked over at the treeline. He could smell blood. Blood and sabers.

"You got a family?" He asked. Duff's eyes began to well up with tears again, and he slowly shook his head without a word. "Oh." Was all the macro could say, not that he had to. He could smell what had happened.

"You have any idea what you're gonna do now? Where you're gonna go?"

"No." Duff said with a sniffle. The macro just couldn't bear to see the little shovelmouth so upset, so he thought up a suggestion.

"Well kid, if you want, you could head down south with the rest of us." He said. "You can join the migration, a trailway where nobody judges, nobody criticizes, and nobody gets picked on no matter what kind of mammal you are. It's just everyone moving on, same as every year, but you don't need to keep moving all the time." Duff was getting interested. "Sometimes, a few of us just decide to not go back north when winter's over. Sometimes, we just stay down south for a time, sometimes even the rest of our lives, but that doesn't mean we have to. It's always a choice. You can either go down south and come back north annually, or you can stay up north and brave the cold(been done before), or you could stay in the warm southern valleys, or, you could just forget all that and go wherever you want to go, do what you want to do, be who you want to be. When you're out in the world, your free. No-one can tell you what or who you are, you decide that. No-one can put you in your place if you don't have one. Sure, most of us migrate with the other herds, but that's just common choice if you wanna play it safe. Safety in numbers, after all."

"But you, my friend, are by yourself right now, and you may be for the rest of your life, but you also might not be. There's really nothing that can ever prepare any one of us for the turns and crossroads life can take us on, but it can be hard to accept them. But I've found through experience that, if you just go along with the choices and intersections of your life when they turn up, your time on earth can become one of the greatest stories never written."

"Wow." Was all Duff could say.

"Now I'm not forcing you, or tellin' you, or in any sense of the word makin' you join the migration. All I'm doing is givin' you some helpful, wholesome advice that can give you a real good chance to make a fulfilling life for yourself, if you try. Now, I'm gonna head back to the trail now, and I dearly hope to see you behind me." With that, the macro turned and began making his way back to the herd.

"Wait!" He turned back upon hearing Duff call out. Duff's tears were gone, and he said, "Thank you."

"No thanks necessary." The macro said with a hearty, kind smile. "The pleasure was all mine." Without another word, the macro melted back into the migrating herds as if he had never left. Duff stood up as he watched in the direction the kind old macro had went, thinking to himself. With a heavy breath, he took one, last, long look back at the forest where he had grown up, where his loved ones had met their ends, but he survived. The image was still fresh in his mind, though it felt like a long time ago. He then turned his gaze back to the migration.

Among the scores of other mammals, the lone macrauchenia walked with his head held eye and his eyes on the horizon. He glanced back for only a moment, and smiled when he saw the young shovelmouth striding towards the convoy and becoming a part of it. _Well, well. The boy's made his choice. Ya' done good, old macro. Ya' done good._

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><p><strong>And so ends the first chapter. Yes, it is going to be one of THOSE stories, that start at the end and the rest is a flashbackmemory.**

**A/N: I'll be using 'macro' as a hypocorism for 'macrauchenia' from time to time, since the name's a bit long.**

**A/N2: If you're wondering why I didn't give that macrauchenia a name, it's because he's meant to represent Duff's inner voice and conscience, or something along those lines.**

**Read and review! **


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